Smart contracts, as the blockchain community defines them, are a subset of computable contracts. The idea of computable contarcts contracts has existed within scholarship since ish the 90's. However, the scholarship and theorizing around the ideas behind computable contracts has been accelerated since blockchain based "smart contracts" have become a technical reality.
- What are smart contracts? (disclosure, mostly my writing)
- What are smart contracts? (what blockchainers think is the original paper here)
- Decentralized Blockchain Technology and the Rise of Lex Cryptographia by Wright and De Filippi
- Series: Smart Contracts and the UCC #1 by Nina Kilbride
There isn't much just yet on the public sector side.
- UK Government report on distributed ledgers and smart contracts (PDF link, haven't finished reading)
- Empowering Distributed Autonomous Companies by Houman Shadab
- How Blockchain Technology Might Transform Personal Insurance by LongFinance (blockchain is in the title, but its mostly about computable contracts)
Via @computational -> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2566535
Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity (which IIRC looks at some interesting challenges around nomenclature and readability)